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“Wow,” he said. “That feels great. I’ve never had a facial before.”

I pressed the cloth strip down and let it cool a bit, then I pulled his skin taut with one hand. “Quick like a Band Aid,” I said. Then I pulled off the strip.

He yelped. “What the hell was that? And thanks for the warning, by the way.”

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I smiled. “Hey, you were the one who said you weren’t a Neanderthal. So you shouldn’t have a unibrow.” He leaned forward in the chair and squinted at himself in the mirror. “I can’t believe you did that to me. And no way did I have a unibrow.”

“Okay,” I said. “A borderline unibrow. See how much better you look now? It really opens up your eyes.”

“Wow, look how red it’s getting. I hope you’re happy now.”

“Delirious,” I said.

Everything was fine until I leaned over him to dab on some Wax Off, a gel that not only gets rid of any residual stickiness from the wax, but also soothes the skin. I was massaging it in, and suddenly he opened his eyes. We looked at each other.

One of his hands somehow ended up on the small of my back.

We looked at each other some more. I knew whenever I smelled Paul Mitchell Extra-Body Sculpting Foam from then on, I’d think of him. One of my hands found its way to his shoulder.

“Hey,” I said.

He put his other hand on my back. “Hey,” he said.

The salon door opened, and Cannoli went crazy.

• 18 •

“I SAW THE LIGHT ON DOWN HERE AND THOUGHT IT

might be you,” Craig said. “Sophia told me you told her at your father’s Salon de Lucio meeting yesterday that you wanted to talk. . . .”

Sean Ryan opened his eyes wide. “Your father owns Salon de Lucio?” he asked. Since it didn’t seem like the best time to review my father’s business portfolio, I just nodded.

“Oh, boy,” he said.

Cannoli made a flying leap and started circling around Craig, nipping at the air around his ankles with eight pounds of pure ferocity.

“Whoa,” Craig said. “Do you think you can call that thing off? What is it, anyway? A black Brillo pad?” It probably said something about my former husband that he hadn’t yet noticed that I was leaning over another man and that our arms and legs had arranged themselves a little bit like a pretzel. Interest in other people had never been his strong suit.

Sean Ryan untangled himself from me and pushed his way out of the chair. He took off his Salon de Paolo cape while I walked over to pick up Cannoli. She leaned out over my arms and snarled at Craig, exposing her tiny pointy teeth.

Craig looked past me. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you had a customer.”

I don’t know why I hesitated. I guess I was trying to figure out what to say. Should I introduce Sean Ryan as my business

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acquaintance? My fellow kit person? My co-dog dyer? The man who was coming to my nephew’s wedding with me to make it easier to deal with the fact that you’d be there with my half sister? The guy I was just about to kiss before you so rudely interrupted us?

Sean Ryan reached into his pocket and threw some bills on my tabletop.

“Thanks for the haircut,” he said as he passed me.

He walked between the Corinthian columns and out the salon door without looking back.

“SO, ARE YOU GOING TO INVITE ME
upstairs?” Craig asked. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and he looked like he could use a good night’s sleep.

“Nope,” I said. I kept Cannoli in my arms and walked over and sat down in the chair Sean Ryan had just vacated. It was still warm, and I took a moment to breathe in the lingering coconut smell of his Paul Mitchell Extra-Body Sculpting Foam. I was happy to see he hadn’t forgotten to take the rest of it with him.

Craig shrugged and sat down in the next chair over.

“So,” I said. I twisted my chair a quarter turn in his direction. “How about those Red Sox?”

“Listen,” Craig said. “Let’s not play games. What’s this about Lizzie?”

I wanted to say,
What’s what about Lizzie?
just to make him nuts, but I resisted. “She asked me to talk to you.” He glared at me. I waited.

“About
what
?” he finally had to ask.

“Don’t use that tone of voice with me,” I said.

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“Don’t make me use it then,” he said.

Cannoli licked my face. I stood up. “Never mind,” I said.

“You can go back to your girlfriend now.” Craig leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. “Were you always this much of a bitch?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Were you always this much of an asshole?”

His eyes were still closed. He smiled. “Probably. You just didn’t notice, because I was so hot.”

“Oh, yeah, right. In your dreams.”

He opened his eyes. They had big, not-so-hot circles under them. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d seen in him. I couldn’t even manage to remember much about our marriage. It seemed two-dimensional in hindsight, like looking back at a series of old-fashioned black-and-white snap-shots. We both worked a lot. We spent a lot of time taking care of his kids. He played a lot of golf. I hung out with my family a lot.

He told me his ex-wife was a bitch a lot, too. I wondered if she was still a bitch now that I was a bitch, or if my moving up to the title somehow debitched her. He wasn’t too crazy about my family, with the exception of Sophia, notable in hindsight, and the feeling was mutual. He only remembered to bring me flowers after a fight. Had we ever been happy?

“Come on, Bella. What’s going on with Lizzie?” I put Precious, I mean Cannoli, on the floor, and she bared her teeth at Craig, then turned her back on him and headed over to drink from the bottom tier of the fountain. We used to drink out of that fountain as kids, so I figured it was probably as safe now as it was then. “She called me,” I said. “She wants to change her major to culinary arts so she can have her own show on the Food Network.”

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“I hope you stayed out of it,” he said.

Until that very moment, I’d planned to. “What’s wrong with it?” I said. “It’s her life.”

“She got a perfect score on her SAT subject test in chemistry.”

“She did not. She got a seven twenty. And there’s tons of chemistry in cooking. That’s probably why she likes it so much.”

Craig crossed his arms over his chest. “Some of us dream bigger than that, Bella.”

“Did you think that up before or after you slept with my sister?”

Craig shut his eyes again. “Half sister. We were separated.

Come on, do we have to go there again? Can’t we just get past the drama and move on?”

“But how could you do that to me?” I heard myself asking, like a soap star who needed better dialogue.

“I didn’t do it to you. It just happened. I guess I just thought I’d get away with it.”

I couldn’t listen to this sitting down, so I jumped up.

“What? What do you mean, you thought you’d get away with it? You didn’t think I’d recognize you at the dinner table at Christmas?”

Craig was actually looking at me now. He ran his hands through his thinning hair and shook his head. “I guess I didn’t think it would happen more than once. I don’t know, I thought she’d be more like you, and not so, I don’t know, clingy.”

This was a whole new category of overshare. I wanted to cover my ears and close my eyes for as long as it took for Craig to go away and for me to forget what he’d just said. But I knew, no matter what I did, I’d remember this one.

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“What?” I finally yelled. “You took my sister away from me and now you don’t even want her?”

Things might have been different if the ceiling hadn’t started dripping on Craig’s head. But it did. He looked up, and a second drop landed right in his eye. I had a knee-jerk urge to laugh, and it was halfway out of my mouth before I kind of swallowed it back.

Craig wiped his eye with the back of his hand. “Geez, Bella, you didn’t leave the toilet running, did you?”

“Ohmigod,” I said. I’d been meaning to call a plumber since Craig left about a year ago. For as long as I could remember, if you didn’t jiggle the handle just right, the toilet would keep running. The next time you’d walk into the bathroom, there’d be a shallow puddle working its way out toward the door. Craig was convinced he’d fixed it every time it happened. He replaced the handle. He replaced some round rubber ball thing and probably some other things, too. But it always happened again eventually.

Craig was already jogging toward the door. “Come on,” he said. “This can’t be good.”

THE WATER IN THE BATHROOM
was ankle deep and rising. “Get some towels,” Craig yelled as he started untying his shoes.

“They’re in the bathroom,” I said.

Craig gave me a look, as if the towels had only started being kept in the bathroom linen closet after he moved out. I didn’t want to deal with all that water alone, so I let it go.

“I know,” I said. “I’ll get some dish towels.” Of course, when I got to the kitchen I remembered I only Summer Blowout

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had two, and neither of them was all that absorbent. So I grabbed two plastic bowls to bail out the water.

I went into the bedroom fast. I kicked off my shoes, pulled off my socks, and switched out my black pants for a ratty old pair of gym shorts. I made it back to the bathroom in time to see Craig wading through the water in the direction of the toilet.

“Ahoy, Matey,” I said.

One of the legs of Craig’s jeans came unrolled and landed in the water with a plop. “Shit,” he said.

“Hope not,” I said. He made a face.

Craig jiggled the handle. The toilet stopped running, and the room was suddenly quiet. I handed Craig a bowl. I scooped up some water with my bowl and dumped it into the sink.

Craig scooped some water with his bowl. “You’re going to have to call a plumber,” he said.

“Ya think?” I said. “Sorry,” I added.

“That’s okay. We probably should have called one years ago.” We bailed in silence for a few moments. The water made a little lapping sound around our ankles.

“Hey,” Craig said. “Remember that time we were in Punta Cana, and the sailboat sprang a leak?”

“And the bailing bucket had a huge crack in it?”

“And we kept waving to everyone onshore for help, and they kept smiling and waving back?”

“That was so funny,” I said. “Well, not at the time, but after.” I poured out a bowl full and bent to scoop another one.

“I was thinking about the time Lizzie was taking her sailing lesson in Marshbury Harbor, and the boat tipped over. You jumped off the side of that pier so fast.”

“I thought she was going to kill me. But I mean, how was I supposed to know it was part of the lesson?” He squatted down 138

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in the water. “Hey, do you really think she should try culinary arts? I mean, she’s such a creative kid. Her mother—”

“That bitch,” I said.

Craig actually smiled. “God,” he said. “Who knew life could get so complicated.”

After we bailed out as much water as we could, we opened the bathroom closet and used the towels to wipe up the rest.